This invention generally relates to mobile communications, and more specifically, to sharing information in cellular telecommunications infrastructures.
Mobile communications has become very widespread, and its use is expected to increase rapidly and substantially. In mobile communications, a variety of devices, such as cell phones, smart phones, and personal digital assistants, are used to receive many types of content including music and video programs.
Mobile communications often involve three parties—the user of the mobile communications device, the operator of the mobile communications network, and a third party that provides the content. In this operation, the mobile communications network operator may have information, such as the location of the user of the communications device that might be useful to the content provider. However, for various reasons, the network operators are reluctant to share this information with the content providers.
The content providers might find this information useful for a number of reasons. For instance, this information might allow the content providers to better target content to particular users—that is, to send specific content to users that have a particular interest in that content. Targeting content is useful in a number of contexts such as mobile marketing. In mobile marketing, as with marketing in general, a population may be segmented into groups, and each person receives advertisements and other marketing information based on which segment of the population that person is in.
Geographic segmentation is one of the three most common ways of segmenting a market for targeted marketing (the other two are demographic and psychographic segmentation). Mobile marketing is a term applied to marketing via handheld devices such as cellphones, iPAD and other tablets, ebook readers, etc. For mobile marketing, in addition to the traditional geographic information (home address), the current and past locations of the user also are important for targeted marketing since these locations hint at demographic and psychographic segmentation of the user, in addition to indicating proximity of users to nearby business opportunities (e.g., a shopping mall or a boutique shop).
A mobile network operator (MNO) is in the best position to have all relevant geographical information about a user and therefore do the best in target marketing. However, MNOs offer a limited set of mobile applications due to various reasons (technical expertise, sales force enablement, business constraints, etc.) and yield to third parties to provide applications that run on top of their cellular infrastructure. As a result, MNOs have not been able to use fully the information that they have. For a number of reasons, MNOs cannot easily monetize their information by sharing it with third party application providers. For instance, the MNOs may not be able to sell geographical information about a customer on a per transaction basis because once the information is released to the third party, the third party can use the information for multiple transactions, depriving the MNOs of recurring revenues.
As opposed to the dilemma faced by the MNOs (they cannot use information themselves and they cannot sell the information to third parties), some third party content providers, referred to as over-the-top (OTT) providers, are in very good position to offer target marketing. For example, some providers can cross-link data gathered from mobile devices (including location information collected without the help of a cellular infrastructure, e.g., location information generated by exploiting wifi access point localization or by GPS) to data collected by their online services (calendar/contact/email/map services). Many mechanisms for cross linking information are used, starting from tracking cookies, to IP address mapping (most broadband providers keep IP addresses fixed for a home for long durations), to mining the web. This cross-linking of information is sufficiently powerful to unmask the real identity of users (that lies behind the pseudo-names created by users for email accounts or when anonymously using services such as YouTube or Google map) and it can be used to serve target advertisements to the customers. However, not all OTT providers have these capabilities and therefore these OTT providers are at a competitive disadvantage.